Purple – The Royal Color

Colour generally evokes great joy in people. The eye needs it just as it needs light. Let us remember the feeling of excitement when, on gloomy days, the sun illuminates just a part of the landscape and shows us its colours… Each colour produces a specific impression on the mind and simultaneously appeals to the eye and emotions. Hence, it follows that colour can be used for certain moral and aesthetic purposes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours

Natural purple colour has been a symbol of nobility, kings, and priests for centuries. This custom dates back to the ruler of Phoenicia, King Phoenix. After receiving a purple cloak from Hercules as a gift, he ordered that future rulers must wear that colour as a royal symbol. The same royal standard applied in Egypt, Persia, Rome, and Byzantium.

King Solomon

Phoenicia was indeed the center of ancient purple production. Phoenician culture reached its peak around 1000 BC, and the production of purple flourished in the bay in the eastern Mediterranean.

long ago, in the city of Tyre, located in present-day Lebanon, the production of a special type of purple dye called Tyrian purple began in the year 1600 BC. This royal purple color was obtained from the glands of the spiny sea snail known as the wolf snail, specifically from two species commonly found in the Mediterranean Sea: Murex brandaris and Murex trunculus. The Croatian name for this snail, “volak,” comes from its horn-like appendages resembling those of a bull. The secret of the purple color lies in its hypobranchial gland, which secretes a slightly yellowish jelly-like substance that turns purple when exposed to air and sunlight after a couple of days. Pliny the Elder, a Roman historian and scientist, left a instruction: the best time to catch these snails is before the rising of Sirius or slightly before the beginning of spring. Around 8000 snails were needed for one gram of pure dye. Throughout history, other civilizations also produced purple dye, but they were unable to achieve the same beauty and colorfastness. The Phoenicians apparently utilized sunlight in the right manner and were believed to possess secret chemical knowledge that they used in their production. The dye eventually made its way to Europe. This color arrived by sea, connecting it to the Silk Road. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the use of Tyrian purple was also reduced, while large-scale production ceased with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Byzantine Emperor Justinian I and Empress Theodora

There are records that the Minoan civilization from Crete used this color around two thousand years before Christ. Furthermore, the indigenous people of Mexico, particularly the Mixtecs, dyed fabrics with extracts from the snail Purpula patula pansa, a relative of the Tyrian snail. While the Tyrians killed the mollusks, as evidenced by the pile of empty snail shells dating back to that time, the Mixtecs only took their slime. They would gently blow into the snail, and it would excrete the precious liquid directly onto the fabric, after which they would return it to the sea. To prevent their extinction, they would not disturb them during their reproduction period. Those involved in dyeing fabrics would go to Huatulco Bay, where the habitats of these snails were located, between October and March. In order to prevent their Due to excessive exploitation of snails, in 1985 it was decided that the production of dye should be allowed only to indigenous people in a traditional way. During the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, fabrics dyed with purple arrived in Europe. Europeans were particularly impressed by the color’s durability and the fact that it looked even more beautiful when the fabric was washed, without the need for a fixing agent.

Persian king Darius I.

The beauty of purple was praised by great ancient and Roman writers. Homer writes about the beauty of the clothing that Paris brought from Phoenicia, and Virgil in the Aeneid depicts the Trojan hero Aeneas dressed in a purple robe. It is also mentioned in the Bible. In the Old Testament, God commands Moses to have curtains in his temple made of purple or crimson. The holy garments of the high priest Aaron, as well as the temples of King Solomon and Herod in Jerusalem, were also purple, and the snails from which this color was obtained – Hexaplex trunculus – are mentioned. In the New Testament, we find in Jesus’ story about Lazarus and the rich man who was dressed in purple clothing. Byzantine art is strongly colored with purple. On mosaics in Ravenna, depicting Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora with envoys, the status of each person can be determined by the amount of purple on their clothing. Pope Paul II introduced “cardinal purple” in 1464 – it is the first vivid color in use since the beginning of the Middle Ages. Surely, the price of this color played a role in its status as a symbol. In the past, the price of clothing largely depended on color, and purple was at the top.

Charlemagne

Purple color is essentially a combination of blue and red: a shade between magenta (fuchsia) and violet. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for crimson, but crimson is a shade of red. While most colors fade at dusk, purple becomes darker, and for the brightest sunlight, it becomes brighter and more intense. In the past, it was believed that the intensity of the purple shade becomes clearer over time, because purple The color does not fade with exposure to sunlight or washing because it is formed by oxidation. In a time when colors were unstable, purple became a symbol of eternity. Additionally, it helped the fabric retain the scent of the person who wore it, so one could tell from a distance that royalty was nearby.

Its uniqueness was diminished by synthetic dyes and pigments. The birth of the chemical industry of synthetic dyes can be traced back to the discovery of aniline – the base of the color purple. It was discovered by William H. Perkin in 1856 while searching for a malaria treatment. This English chemist made purple color accessible to everyone.

Interesting research was conducted by two great scientists of modern times, Isaac Newton and Johann W. Goethe. In 1676, Newton discovered the spectrum of colors by refracting white light through a prism. He combined the seven colors of the spectrum into a circle and obtained an unnatural transition between blue and red. He added an eighth color – purple, calling it an extraspectral color. Goethe, in 1810, also conducted research on colors Learning about colors was the fruit of a forty-year study. From this extensive and systematic theory, the Color Wheel stands out, which aims to represent the spiritual principle of all colors. In it, colors are divided according to symbolic and psychological qualities, forming a circle based on certain laws and relationships. While green, attributed to the earth by Goethe, represents the foundation of this circle, on the opposite side, at its zenith, lies the color purple as the ultimate culmination within the color wheel, a result of natural gradation. According to Goethe, it represents the highest spiritual principle among colors; the culmination of a long process of refinement and therefore the color of a spiritual ruler. It simultaneously expresses seriousness and dignity, gentleness and grace – in other words, the significance of spiritual nobility. Just as intonation gives color to spoken words, color gives a spiritual essence to form, as stated by Swiss painter and art educator Johannes Itten (1888-1967) in his work. The Art of Color.

In Chinese tradition, the color purple is associated with the ruler, but also with the polar star, the North Star, known as Ziwei (Purple Star) in Chinese, which is the abode of the heavenly emperor, the ruler of the sky. The earthly counterpart of the polar star was the Forbidden City, the capital of the earthly emperor.

Ancient peoples used colors as a means of expressing inner content and symbolic values. Itten, who studied colors from a philosophical, religious, psychological, and physical point of view, writes: Color is life, a world without color would seem dead… Today’s interest in colors is almost exclusively optical-material in nature and does not rely on cognitive-emotional experience… The deepest secret of the effects of colors eludes conceptual formulation, it remains inaccessible even to the eye, as it can only be perceived through the heart.

1 Phoenicia – from Gr. Phoiniki = purple land. The name Phoenicia derives from the Greeks, while the inhabitants themselves called their land Canaan.